Viseme

A viseme is a special word that helps make cartoons and animations look like they are talking. When you talk, your mouth and face make different shapes and movements to make the different sounds. The same thing happens when cartoons and animations talk, they have to make different mouth and face movements for different sounds.

So, when animators make cartoons or animations talk, they break up the spoken words into smaller parts called phonemes. Each phoneme is like a puzzle piece that when put together with other phonemes can make words.

But, since animating every single phoneme can be very hard and time-consuming, the animators use visemes. Visemes are groups of phonemes that have similar mouth movements. For example, the sounds "B," "M," and "P" all have the same mouth movement, so they would all use the same viseme.

By using visemes, animators can make it look like the characters are talking without having to animate every single sound. And that's all there is to it, even a five-year-old can understand how visemes help make cartoons talk!